Out of sheer curiosity, would you then prefer if, instead of say, 12 regions there were a single central region of some sort all characters started in? Or some in-between option? Or some other option?
Here is my suggestion/opinion. Core adventures continue much the way they are with adventures released in all tiers and without much overarcing plot. Regional adventures will be completely remodeled. Each Region would write around 4 adventures a year, all released at once. (12 regions, 12 months, one a month) These 4 adventures would be a major quest and cover a plotline, along with being in one tier so they could be played in a row if desired. Then to add a little more regional flavor give an advantage for playing in your "home" region. I am thinking a mild XP bonus. Or maybe for completing a major quest in your home region earns you a special cert.
Those are godd ideas. The key to me is that you can play a PC and be in one storyline. Ideally, it is a regional storyline.
So, if I like the Dragon Coast, then I would like to be able to start a PC and play a bunch of Dragon Coast adventures. It is where I am from and it is what I care about. I don't have to play just in the DC, but a good amount of play should be there. What the exact balance should be, I'm not sure. In LG, it felt like the majority of play was in a region. Later, it also included a meta-region, which worked well since LG had grown to have solid reasons for caring about one's neighbors.
Right now, most PCs/players have 0 reason to care about their own region, let alone the neighboring regions. There is little regional flavor in adventures. While AKAN1-1 is a famous example (you start with a summary of having been in the capital, but you never are told about the insanely cool city), AKAN1-7 basically does the same. You start in a wondrous city but only the barest description is provided. You then leave that location. Some adventures have done a good job, suck as DALE1-6 and AKAN1-2, giving you a feel for what the place is like. AKAN1-7 has solid cultural bias information.
For LFR play to really be flavorful, you need more information and more links between play experiences. Just having story arcs is not enough. While I am happy with an arc like the Radiance Against Thay, it does get watered down... 3 adventures amongst 30 means the 3-adventure arcs don't stand out as much.
If doing things all over, my pick would be to either embrace regions or remove them entirely. If you embrace them, make fewer of them and more mods per region, with more admins per region. Aim for strong story links, cross-regional links, and focus on the stories of those regions. Mimic the LG experience, but open to eveyone. Have story awards strongly integrated and predicated on results/choices. You choose a group to befriend in one adventure, having implications in the next.
The other alternative is to remove the regions. Just write stories and have the stories matter. Plan out a set of three arcs that are related, each with 2-3 adventures, and have various writing directors for the arcs. As a player you latch onto a story and then want to follow it to its conclusion.
In both models a key is for the story to be playable without leveling out too easily.
In the interest of full disclosure, how could LG have "major history changing storylines" when the history was never recorded? Yes, to the regional participants, they were (in their mind) making history, but is it a history that can be and will be viewed by anyone on the outside afterwards? If it was recorded, where is it?
What is stunning is that LG is arguably more real and more carefully recorded (in adventures, meta-org books, online teasers, etc.) than the "canon" LFR play. Because it had solidity, it was tracked, at the very least in players' minds. WotC revues proposals... but I haven't heard of anyone recording results! If they did, then sure, this might matter. But, no one at WotC is making a note based on what the recent BI accomplished, what each story arc did, etc. It is canon as protectionism, not as impact.
But, no one at WotC is making a note based on what the recent BI accomplished, what each story arc did, etc. It is canon as protectionism, not as impact.
That's not actually true. We hope to post a web article with a summary of the events in the near future, but remember that WOTC web content is planned out a few monthes ahead, so it will likely be a month or two before it gets posted on the official site. We can probably have something on the Community site quicker.
I didn't play LG, so I have no basis for comparison; I would like more regional flavor. Some random ideas...
Bonuses for playing in-region. I think getting rid of the penalties was a great idea, but maybe we could compensate by going in the other direction? It's probably silly to try and solve two problems at once, but what if you only got more than two reward cards in your stack if you were playing in-region?
Something DMs can do: play up regional events. I had to cancel my MYRE this weekend thanks to our local blizzard, but if it happens next weekend I'm going to have some of the Sambral NPCs quiz the PCs about these rumors they've been hearing about Elturgard. "Hey, we heard there was some kind of huge battle? And maybe they're going to need reinforcements? Were you guys involved in that?"
I don't think you need a MYRE to do that; I could drop that sort of thing into a normal adventure too. And not just for big BI-type stuff. Maybe we could have a list of plot rumors for each region? I think players could handle that without needing admin involvement, even.
Tighter story arcs. Arts & Crafts was excellent, story-wise. More like that would be good. We're seeing a lot of recurring NPCs, which is also great.
I'll chime in here to agree with Alphastream--at the moment, I don't get anything out of regions except a minor degree of quality control. (In general, I expect Baldur's Gate and Impiltur mods to be good and East Rift mods to be bad).
Except for a few regions (Baldur's Gate, Waterdeep, Impiltur), even after playing most of a first year of adventures, I don't have much of a sense of what the region is about or what is going on there and except for Waterdeep and Impiltur (and Baldur's Gate to a much lesser degree), I haven't had a good sense of any continuous storyline in the region and because all of the quest adventures that could provide that have been spread out over several tiers, those stories have been highly diluted by trips to Sembia or the Moonshaes in between parts 1 and 2 and then again between parts 2 and 3.
Either way, I would support either of Alphastream's suggestions: 1. Fewer regions with more adventures per region. This would allow players to play series of adventures in region and would give us a means to understand and become involved in storylines more complex than the dungeon of the week. The increased number of regional adventures is essential for this. To use an analogy, you can pick nearly any Star Trek or Next Generation episode, watch it, and get the full alien or conflict of the week experience. But if you were to select a random episode of Babylon 5, 24, Heroes, or (as I gather) Lost, and watch it, you would struggle to understand what was going on. And if you went a month or two and then watched another episode of that show, you would still be lost. That's just how things work. If you want to tell a story over several episodes, you need to be able to play or watch those episodes in sequence without a lot of other things in between. If we want players and adventures to have a stronger connection to the setting, we need to have enough adventures in each tier and in the region that we can get a sense for the region without baldur's gate, westgate, and waterdeep all blending together.
I suppose we wouldn't really need fewer regions to have more adventures per region but assuming that the current level of staffing and administration is necessary to produce the adventures that are currently being produced, more adventures per region would require less staff or more regions.
2. Eliminate regions entirely. Rather than regions, have administrators assigned to various story arcs. This would be a more radical departure from the current system, but I think it would focus more on what at least I would like to get out of LFR. It would also allow more flexibility in setting. If you want to tell a story in the Moonsea region right now, it has to be core (though Dalelands might be able to get away with it I suppose). Thus some regions of the Realms are necessarily unexplored while others get a lot of exposure. The danger of this approach would, of course, be that having everything non-core be a long and interlinked story arc might not be a good thing for LFR. Initially, the administration was wary of such an approach and I can see why. I played my 4th level rogue low-tier in order to avoid leveling out of the mini-campaign before I can play Mini 1-6 and another character (who is committed to playing all of the Minis in order) is languishing at 2nd level because our "lets play the minis in order" group seems to have collapsed. I wouldn't want to see that become more widespread.
One other suggestion would be: 3. If the current system is to be unchanged, please produce and approve fewer off-flavor adventures. Naturally, every adventure proposal for a region will not be classic "region X" flavor; some will be generic and some will be playing against type. And administrators might even have very good reason to accept some of those adventures from time to time. Maybe the author is very good and the adventure is good enough to outweigh regional considerations. Maybe they had another adventure fall through and need something to replace it right away. But even so, with only a few regional adventures per year in each band, selecting adventures that play against type for the region dilutes the regional feel very quickly. In my area, the local joke is that if you want to go underground, go to Aglarond but if you want to traipse through forests on the surface, go to the east rift. That's not entirely fair, but there's some truth buried in it. Just like there is (barely) room for one angsty good drow with scimitars, but making many more will change the flavor of the drow who otherwise make excellent villains, you can't have many adventures go against regional type without changing/destroying the flavor of the region.
To re-iterate (while being more succinct) one of my earlier comments: the key to me is a sense of "ownership." LG at its best (and in the right regions) had a sense of ownership. The Triad really drove the storyline and players were active participants. The Triad would release story interludes and updates -- keeping the player base informed as to what was going on. The regular mods would get things going and then interactives would really enhance the process. Then, the results -- especially of interactives -- would get reported back to the player base -- recharging the whole process. Further, story awards really mattered. You could have influence points to use or face sanctions if you were viewed unfavorably, etc. You always felt like your actions had consequences and that those consequences mattered. IMO, this is what LFR is lacking.
I don't want to comment on the suggested fixed yet, because I think its first important to identify the problem/issue. And for me, "ownership" is it.
To re-iterate (while being more succinct) one of my earlier comments: the key to me is a sense of "ownership." LG at its best (and in the right regions) had a sense of ownership. The Triad really drove the storyline and players were active participants. The Triad would release story interludes and updates -- keeping the player base informed as to what was going on. The regular mods would get things going and then interactives would really enhance the process. Then, the results -- especially of interactives -- would get reported back to the player base -- recharging the whole process. Further, story awards really mattered. You could have influence points to use or face sanctions if you were viewed unfavorably, etc. You always felt like your actions had consequences and that those consequences mattered. IMO, this is what LFR is lacking.
I don't want to comment on the suggested fixed yet, because I think its first important to identify the problem/issue. And for me, "ownership" is it.
Daren
I get what Drezden is saying about ownership. The trick is to avoid "exclusive ownership" at all costs. You need to find a way for a n00b playing his first adventure to start to feel that ownership, or at least the potential for it. LG didn't always have this.
I've posted about it several times over the years (even back into LG days). It is VERY hard to recognize an Old Boys' Club from the inside. Personally, I was a very active and reasonably visible member of the LG Old Boys' Club, so everything seemed custom-designed just for me (and my friends). For years I loved every minute of the campaign, travelling to play in other regions, writing modules and interactives, joining Triads (I was on two), making suggestions that were actually implemented, and generally feeling like a part of the machinery that ran the campaign.
Eventually I ended up taking on a smaller role in the global scene and a larger role in the local scene, trying to work on my local club membership. It was at this point, as I tried to explain LG and the RPGA to entice new players, that I realized that there were problems with the model. Part of it was the 100+ page rules document, sure. Another part of it was that the epic, decade-spanning plotlines were not really approachable. The more important part, though, was that there was always this unspoken assumption in every module that the DM and all the players would already "get" what's going on. Not just plot or regional background, but how the whole thing was supposed to go. It was very intimidating for new people to try to get on board. Sure, some folks made the leap, we added new members to our club right through the end of LG. But the proportion of new players retained in LFR is far ahead of what we managed in LG.
I'm not sure how well I'm explaining this. Rereading it looks like a jumbled mess...
I think that in the end, the one thing we need to always keep in mind is this: could a new group of players, presupposing a basic understanding of the D&D core rules, pick up any of the latest modules (we'll assume that they're picking up the start of a story arc, not midway) and the latest CCG, and have all the information necessary to run the adventure more-or-less as intended without any other outside help or information? So far in LFR I'd say that the answer is almost universally YES. After about 2002 in LG I'd say that the answer was generally but not always NO.
It may be a little too late to re-vamp the region system. It would require a lot of work and really runs the chance of disrupting the campaign enough that players lose interest and go elsewhere. I've seen too many times where an overhaul of a system causes many users to leave, even if the final resulting system is better than it was before.
Rather than altering what's already in place, add to it.
Perhaps factions can be introduced. Groups that in the next year or so get worked in and feature prominently in many adventures. Some might be tied to regions, others to agendas or ideals. Eventually players should be able to earn membership in one or more of these factions.
Membership really needs to be earned, because that which is free has no value. I don't say that to be funny - people just don't value things as much unless they feel like they had to work for it. It can't be too difficult to gain entry, but it should take some effort.
The factions don't really have to offer major benefits. What they need to do, however, is be intimately linked to what the players do. They need to show up in most gameplay to some degree, perhaps having a sub-mission for members in one event, or perhaps members have a social option in another event that non-members can't access. Whatever, it can't be stuck in the background, not affecting the player characters most of the time.
-karma
LFR Characters: Lady Tiana Elinden Kobori Silverwane - Drow Control Wizard Kro'tak Warscream - Orc Bard Fulcrum of Gond - Warforged Laser Cleric
I wonder if there might be some sort of perk a character could get after playing some number of mods from a given region. Something to encourage players to focus their character's efforts along fewer potlines. Ideally, it would be something that would grant a sense of ownership maybe even a vote in which direction the plot goes through either in or out-of-game means.
I'm not sure how well I'm explaining this. Rereading it looks like a jumbled mess...
Actually, it made perfect sense to me (but then, I was also pretty involved in my LG region).
You've hit the nail on the head, I think. It's clear that the RPGA wants to be able to continually attract new players into LFR. Given that, anything that would be done to increase regional flavor / ownership would have to be balanced with maintaining the low "barrier to entry" that the campaign currently has.
"Of course [Richard] has a knife. He always has a knife. We all have knives. It's 1183, and we're barbarians!" - Eleanor of Aquitaine, "The Lion in Winter"
